Switching to Docker as an option for many of my quick labs has also meant the same ability to run as an abstraction on top of my laptop so that I don’t end up in dependency hell with development libraries and underlying infrastructure needs that quickly begin to conflict as I do more testing and development.

Installing Docker Toolbox on Mac OSX or Windows

The best way to get started is to run the Docker Toolbox platform which deploys a Docker environment with popular and important Docker tools including:

Rather than document the steps on a continuously changing set of screens, I recommend that you follow the installation process with the tools you desire using the guides provided by Docker here: https://docs.docker.com/toolbox/overview/

Once you’re installed, you can kick the tires on Docker using your first Docker Hello World test container using the docker run hello-world command:

You can see that the container image was not local, so a download process started and then the container was launched. As long as you see the results like above, you’re in business!

We will be using this as a baseline for a lot of other examples in the blog. As usual, this is meant to emulate a basic Docker configuration and does not really reflect a multi-node deployment with overlay networking. The goal is to be able to quickly and easily launch containers using Docker Engine for a number of admin tasks that can replace what we may have been doing inside dedicated workstations or sandbox virtual machines in the past.